iPhone in retrospect: where it has been, where it’s going

Apple's iPhone and iPhone OS are certainly wonders of modern mobile phone …

The iPhone may be a great gadget capable of any number of modern mobile computing marvels, thanks largely to Apple's frequent OS updates and the broad potential of App Store applications. But Apple's latest mass market accomplishment has not always been such an impressive device, as its 1.0 release on June 29, 2007 lacked some significant features in both hardware and software. In fact, one could argue that even an iPhone 3G is still pretty handicapped when compared to current competition, no matter how many pages of applications may be installed. Let's take a look back at how far the iPhone and iPhone OS have come, and what competitive ground the two have yet to cover.

There

In the beginning there was iPhone 1.0, and it was good—at least, if you were fed up with the current experience offered by much of the mobile phone market. Apple's premium $500 and $600 hardware and slick mobile phone OS certainly brought a breath of fresh air, but it's hard to deny that this initial release lacked many features that came standard from even the carriers' free throw-away phones. Multimedia messages still have yet to appear on the iPhone, but even simple features, like sending a text message to more than one person at a time, were nowhere to be seen.

A September 2007 update brought the much-praised iTunes WiFi Music Store (along with the launch of the original iPod touch), but it also came with some of the coolest "little features" like double-tapping the space bar to type a period, landscape view for Mail attachments, and a battery status indicator in the iPhone's menubar for the Apple Bluetooth Headset (one of my favorite features, personally). It took until this update, however, for Apple to allow users to turn off EDGE/GPRS roaming when venturing away from US soil.

SMS-ing more than one person at once on what was originally a $600 phone. Be still our beating hearts

A November 2007 update brought such cutting-edge features (that's sarcasm, for those of you whose detectors are broken) as a custom ringtones in the iPhone's Contacts app, but it took until the Macworld Expo in January 2008 for the first major iPhone OS feature update to arrive. This introduced quite a few new capabilities and fixes, including pseudo-GPS "Locate Me" functionality to Google Maps, the "HTML is your SDK" Web Clip feature, and the mind-blowing ability to SMS more than one person at a time.

Fast-forward through a few bug and security fixes in the first half of 2008 to July 11 for the iPhone OS 2.0 release; we're sure you all remember how craptastically that went. Apple released the iPhone 3G, new OS, and a dramatically revamped MobileMe all at the same time, which gave us the wonderful App Store, gobs of great new iPhone OS features, but quite a few headaches to top it all off. Sure, iPhones gained the handy new ability to snap screenshots without having to be jailbroken, but this was also the first time users got basic features like contact search, contact importing from SIM cards, and multiple calendar support. That chuckling sound you hear is the mass of BlackBerry and Windows Mobile owners who are laughing at us, not with us.

Back again

Amid a digital App Store goldrush and a smartphone market that is gearing up to strike back at Apple's success, it's worth exploring what the mighty iPhone OS 2.2 and iPhone 3G still cannot do when pitted up against its competition. Sure, some of these missing features can be enabled by jailbreaking, but let's face it: wiping one's phone every time Apple fixes a bug gets to be a pain, and workarounds are rarely a long-term substitute for the real thing.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, if you're RIM, HTC, or Palm), the iPhone still lacks plenty of features that other phones offer, and have offered for some time. Starting with the basics that even free (non-smart)phones have built-in, the iPhone still cannot record video or do anything useful with Bluetooth, like exchange files, connect to a Mac's Address Book for SMS management, or use such spectacular apps like Salling Clicker; three things that my six-year-old, free Sony Ericsson T68m did quite well.

Then there's the iPhone's continued lack of notebook tethering for a data connection, the ability to search in Mail, wireless syncing (without paying for MobileMe or having access to an Exchange environment), and voice dialing (again, out of the box). Let's also not forget one of the loudest collective complaints about a missing feature that other smartphones and even dumbphones have offered for years: copy and paste. Sure, Apple's VP of iPhone and iPod marketing Greg Joswiak stated in the past that the feature is on Apple's to-do list (a list which cannot be synced with an iPhone since iPhone OS still offers no native support for tasks), but this feature is, at best, iPhone vaporware for the time being.

Wrap this gripefest up with a lack of a flash memory slot, disk storage, and some kind of a third-party app syncing platform (even a wired one) like Palm Conduit or ActiveSync, and it's clear why some may be hesitant to call the iPhone a "smart" phone. Apple is doing some great work in the mobile phone space, and one could even argue that the iPhone (perhaps singlehandedly) sparked a smartphone revolution. Thecompetition is certainly not sleeping on the job anymore, though, and Apple has its work cut out for it moving forward.